Saturday, June 16, 2018

The
number of cyber-attacks targeting Singapore skyrocketed from June 11
to June 12, during the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump
and North Korean President Kim Jong-un in a Singapore hotel, and most
of these attacks originated from Russia, F5 Labs reports.

Russia
has long been said to keep the United States under a continuous
barrage of cyber-attacks, and even attracted a series of sanctions
following the hacking
aimed at the 2016 presidential election, which was supposedly the
doing of state-sponsored Russian threat actors.

Thus,
it’s no wonder the Trump-Kim summit earlier this week was targeted
as well, but the number of assaults coming from Russia is indeed
impressive: 88% of the total number of observed cyber-attacks came
from this country. Furthermore, 97% of all the attacks that
originated from Russian during the timeframe targeted Singapore, data
from F5 Labs and Loryka reveals.

“We
cannot prove they were nation-state sponsored attacks, however the
attacks coincide with the day President Donald Trump met with North
Korean President Kim Jong-un in a Singapore hotel. The
attacks targeted VoIP phones and IoT devices, which
appears to be more than a mere coincidence,” F5 says.

In 2017, the U.S. hit Volkswagen with a $4.3
billion fine as part of the company’s plea agreement for
violating of the Clean Air Act. It was a rough ride for the
automaker, caught using defeat devices on its diesel engines, but it
brought the scandal more or less to a close in America.

An ocean away, it
seemed nothing would come of the endless
raids by German authorities on VW-owned facilities. Apparently,
the wheels of justice just turn a little slower in Europe, as the
automaker was fined 1 billion euros on Wednesday. It’s one of the
largest financial penalties ever imposed on a company by German
authorities.

According to Reuters,
Volkswagen is not contesting the penalty. “Following thorough
examination, Volkswagen AG accepted the fine and it will not lodge an
appeal against it. Volkswagen AG, by doing so, admits its
responsibility for the diesel crisis and considers this as a further
major step toward the latter being overcome,” the automaker said in
a statement.

This might work in classrooms! Do they really
need one jammer per cell?

Federal officials say they conducted a successful
test earlier this year of a jamming technology some hope will help
combat the threat posed by inmates with smuggled cellphones.

A report obtained Friday by The Associated Press
details the January 17 test of micro-jamming technology at a federal
prison in Cumberland, Maryland. Officials say they were able to shut
down phone signals inside a prison cell, while phones about 20 feet
away worked normally.

I think this might be wise. (Not something I
often say about California.)

California officials bucked a recent
court ruling Friday and offered reassurance to concerned coffee
drinkers that their fix won't give them cancer. The unprecedented
action by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to
propose a regulation to essentially clear coffee of the stigma that
it could pose a toxic risk followed a review of more than 1,000
studies published this week by the World Health Organization that
found inadequate evidence that coffee causes cancer.

The state agency implements a law passed by voters
in 1986 that requires warnings of chemicals known to cause cancer and
birth defects. One of those chemicals is acrylamide, which is found
in many things and is a byproduct of coffee roasting and brewing
present in every cup of joe.

If the regulation is adopted, it would be a huge
win for the coffee industry which faces potentially massive civil
penalties after recently losing an 8-year-old lawsuit in Los Angeles
Superior Court that could require scary warnings on all coffee
packaging sold in California.

Judge Elihu Berle found that Starbucks and other
coffee roasters and retailers had failed to show that benefits from
drinking coffee outweighed any cancer risks. He had previously ruled
the companies hadn't shown the threat from the chemical was
insignificant.

… "The proposed regulation would state
that drinking coffee does not pose a significant cancer risk, despite
the presence of chemicals created during the roasting and brewing
process that are listed under Proposition 65 as known carcinogens,"
the agency said in a statement. "The proposed regulation is
based on extensive scientific evidence that drinking coffee has not
been shown to increase the risk of cancer and may reduce the risk of
some types of cancer."

… Founded in 2017, Dongguan, Guangdong-based
Xiaohuanggou is owned by Paithink Group, an investment company that
focuses on fintech. It places smart garbage recycling machines close
to residential areas, hotels and business centers. With
Xiaohuanggou’s app and WeChat mini-program, users can locate the
nearby recycling stations. The
machine will automatically weight the garbage and pay users by cash.

Its recycling station has several machines for
different types of wastes, including paper, plastic, metal, waste
textiles, glass and others. Its staff will then send the garbage to
different specialized recycling organizations.

The supply chain is the heart of a company’s
operations. To make the best decisions, managers need access to
real-time data about their supply chain, but the limitations of
legacy technologies can thwart the goal of end-to-end transparency.
However, those days may soon be behind us. New digital technologies
that have the potential to take over supply chain management entirely
are disrupting traditional ways of working. Within 5-10 years,
the supply chain function may be obsolete, replaced by a smoothly
running, self-regulating utility that optimally manages end-to-end
work flows and requires very little human intervention.

With a digital foundation in place, companies can
capture, analyze, integrate, easily access, and interpret high
quality, real-time data — data that fuels process automation,
predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics, the
technologies that will soon take over supply chain management.

Thousands of passengers remain stranded Friday
morning after all PSA flights were canceled at Charlotte-Douglas
International Airport Thursday night due to a technical issue,
airline officials said.

There were roughly 275 flights canceled, with
about 120 of them in Charlotte. The airport tweeted around 8 a.m.
Friday that PSA plans to resume operations at noon though Channel 9
learned overnight that those flights would not resume until 6 p.m.

… On Thursday night a spokeswoman for American
Airlines said there was no timeline for when the issue will be
resolved.

The European Commission today named
52 experts to its High Level Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI
HLG), an advisory body tasked with drafting AI ethics guidelines,
anticipating challenges and opportunities in AI, and steering the
course of Europe’s machine learning investments.

The 52 new members — 30 men and 22 women —
were selected from an applicant pool of 500 and come from titans of
industry like Bosch, BMW, Bayer, and AXA, in addition to AI research
leaders that include Google, IBM, Nokia Bell Labs,
STMicroelectronics, Telenor, Zalando, Element AI, Orange, SAP,
Sigfox, and Santander.

… As part of that engagement effort, the
Alliance today launched a public online
platform of discussion forums, blogs, documents, and events meant
to foster conversations about AI. A list of planned AI HLG and AI
Alliance meetings, workshops, and consultations will be made
available online via the Commission’s Register
of Expert Groups.

… Today’s announcement comes just over a
month after the White House set up a
task force dedicated to U.S. artificial intelligence efforts.

At
this week's International Homeland Security Forum (IHSF) hosted in
Jerusalem by Israel’s minister of public security, Gilad Erdan,
Facebook claimed growing success in its battle to remove extremist
content from the network.

Dr.
Erin Marie Saltman, Facebook counterterrorism policy lead for EMEA,
said, "On Terrorism content, 99% of terrorist content from ISIS
and al-Qaida we take down ourselves, without a single user flagging
it to us. In the first quarter of 2018 we took down 1.9 million
pieces of this type of terrorist content."

This
was achieved by a combination of Facebook staff and machine learning
algorithms.

… However,
the implication that Facebook is winning the war against extremism is
countered by a report ('Spiders of the Caliphate: Mapping the Islamic
Stateís Global Support Network on Facebook' PDF)
published in May 2018 by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Google, seemingly aware that people are unnerved
by just how much ad networks know about us, today said
it’s refining how it lets you control what ads you see. The
company has updated its ad personalization settings page, and in the
process, has kindly reminded us that it’s easy to turn off
personalized ads altogether.

If you currently have the ad personalization
feature turned on, Google’s refreshed Ad
Settings page should include a list of topics and categories that
Google is potentially using to serve you ads.

… Google is also updating its Why
This Ad? links, product manager Philippe de Lurand Pierre-Paul
wrote
in a blog post on June 14: “We’ve now significantly expanded
coverage of this feature; starting today, you’ll see Why this ad?
notices on all our services that show Google Ads ...

… Google’s update today is a good reminder
to turn off targeted ads if you’d rather not have companies
targeting you as precisely as Google allows. You can view
your current settings here. If you have multiple Google
accounts, you’ll need to adjust each one.

After years
of growth, the use of social media for news is falling across the
world

NiemanLab:
“…People are becoming disenchanted with Facebook for news. The
“Trump bump” appears to be sustaining itself. And younger people
are more likely to donate money to a news organization than older
people. These are some of the findings from a big new report out
Thursday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism. The Reuters Institute’s Digital
News Report for 2018 surveyed more than 74,000 people in 37
countries about their digital news consumption. (Included in the
report for the first time this year: Bulgaria.) The research is
based on online YouGov surveys earlier this year, followed by
face-to-face focus groups in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Brazil on
the topics of social media and messaging apps. The report includes a
number of findings on fake news, misinformation, and trust in the
media; for more on those topics, see this
piece by the report’s authors, and I’ll also include some
more info in Friday’s
fake news column…”

… People familiar with the deal told Quartz
that at least three investors involved in that round—Sequoia,
Accel, and Tusk Ventures—have already signed documents and wired
money to Bird.

Bird is now raising additional funds in the series
C round, seeking a total of $300 million, which would value it around
$2 billion, sources familiar with the deal said. “People have
definitely given them cash at the $2 billion valuation,” one of the
people told Quartz.

… Bird is still remarkable for how quickly it
achieved unicorn status. Founded
in September 2017, Bird hit the $1 billion marker in well
under a year, the fastest ever.

SoftBank Group Corp. is in discussions to
invest another giant slug of capital in WeWork Cos., with a deal that
would value the shared-office company at $35 billion to $40 billion,
according to people familiar with the matter.

Such an investment would roughly double
WeWork’s $20 billion valuation, set last August when SoftBank
invested $4.4 billion in the company.

I have to say, if SoftBank is going to become the
entire market for hot private technology startups, then every
valuation is going to be marked-to-SoftBank, and the numbers will
start to lose their meaning.

The professor was incredulous. David Craig had
been studying the rise of entertainment on social media for several
years when a Facebook Inc. employee he didn’t know emailed him last
December, asking about his research. “I thought I was being
pumped,” Craig said. The company flew him to Menlo Park and
offered him $25,000 to fund his ongoing projects, with no obligation
to do anything in return.

… The free gifts are just one of the
little-known and complicated ways Facebook works with academic
researchers. For scholars, the scale of Facebook’s 2.2 billion
users provides an irresistible way to investigate how human nature
may play out on, and be shaped by, the social network. For Facebook,
the motivations to work with outside academics are far thornier, and
it’s Facebook that decides who gets access to its data to examine
its impact on society.

… More than a hundred Ph.D.-level researchers
work on Facebook’s in-house core data science team, and employees
say the information that points to growth has had more of an impact
on the company's direction than Chief Executive Officer Mark
Zuckerberg’s ideas.

Facebook is far more hesitant to work with
outsiders; it risks unflattering findings, leaks of proprietary
information, and privacy breaches. But Facebook likes it when
external research proves that Facebook is great. And in the fierce
talent wars of Silicon Valley, working with professors can make it
easier to recruit their students.

… The company has stopped short of pursuing
deeper research on potentially negative fallout of its power.
According to its public database of published research, Facebook’s
written more
than 180 public papers about artificial intelligence but just one
study about elections, based on an experiment Facebook ran on 61
million users to mobilize voters in the Congressional midterms back
in 2010.

This year has been a rough one for Sphero. The
Colorado-based toy robotics startup kicked off the year with dozens
of layoffs, a result of tepid interest in its line of
Disney-branded consumer products.

Here’s a little good news, however. The company
has raised another $12 million, bringing its total up to around $119
million, according
to Crunchbase. The latest round will go into helping shape the
BB-8 maker into an education-first company.

App Maker,
Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of
beta

It’s been a year and a half since Google
announced App Maker, its online tool for quickly building and
deploying business apps on the web. The company has mostly remained
quiet about App Maker ever since and kept it in a private preview
mode, but today, it announced
that the service is now generally available and open to all
developers who want to give it a try.

Access to App Maker comes with any G Suite
Business and Enterprise subscription, as well as the G
Suite for Education edition. The overall idea here is to
help virtually anybody in an organization — including those with
little to no coding experience — to build their own
line-of-business apps based on data that’s already stored in G
Suite, Google’s Cloud SQL database or any other database that
supports JDBC
or that offers a REST API (that that’s obviously a bit more of an
advanced operation).

Apple is
reportedly closing a security loophole that will prevent police from
accessing iPhones

Apple is reportedly changing the default settings
on iPhones to close a loophole which can be used to access locked
phones via the charging and data port.

The software update, reported
by The New York Times, will disable the iPhone's Lightning port
an hour after the phone is locked. After that, a user will be able
to charge the phone, but unable to transfer any data to or from the
device unless the passcode is entered.

The update will block anyone using a GrayKey
device, which costs $15,000 (£11,000) and can be used to hack into
iPhones via the Lightning port. Multiple US law enforcement agencies
have purchased such devices, including the Drug
Enforcement Administration.

… "We're constantly strengthening the
security protections in every Apple product to help customers defend
against hackers, identity thieves and intrusions into their personal
data," Apple spokesman, Fred Sainz, said in an email quoted by
the New
York Times.

"We have the greatest respect for law
enforcement, and we don't
design our security improvements to frustrate their efforts to do
their jobs."

Mozilla
Asked People How They Feel About Facebook. Here’s What They Said

Medium:
“47,000 people responded to our survey asking how they feel about
Facebook. The data is interesting and open
for your exploration. Facebook has been in the news a
lot lately. It started with the announcement that over 87 million
Facebook users had their personal information shared with the private
firm Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge. Since then,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has testified twice in front of the US
Congress and people all around the world have been talking about
Facebook’s data practices. We took this opportunity to survey
people on how they felt about Facebook these days. The results are
in and they
are interesting. The top takeaways? Most people (76%)
say they are very concerned about the safety of their personal
information online. Yet few people (24%)
reported making changes to their Facebook accounts
following the recent news of privacy concerns around Facebook. The
majority of people who responded to our survey (65%)
see themselves — rather than companies or the government — as
being most responsible for protecting their personal information
online. And very few people (only 12%)
said they would consider paying for Facebook, even a version of
Facebook that doesn’t make money by collecting and selling personal
data…”

It implies wisdom is somehow part of the
same family as data and information, and it isn’t. Wisdom is more
of a virtue or a spiritual quality, and not amenable to management
discipline…”

An over-reactive strategy? Amazon did it, so we
have to jump on it too or Amazon will own the market? Easy to sell
to any company that feels threatened, but what is Amazon determined
that it was a bad idea?

Microsoft Corp is working on technology that would
eliminate cashiers and checkout lines from stores, in a nascent
challenge to Amazon.com Inc’s automated grocery shop, six people
familiar with the matter told Reuters.

… Microsoft’s technology aims to help
retailers keep pace with Amazon Go, a highly automated store that
opened to the public in Seattle in January. Amazon customers scan
their smartphones at a turnstile to enter. Cameras and sensors
identify what they remove from the shelves. When customers are
finished shopping, they simply leave the store and Amazon bills their
credit cards on file.

Perspective. Wakanda is real? Perhaps I should
expand my list of tech cultures.

Google will
open an AI center in Ghana later this year, its first in Africa

… Today, Google announced its next AI research
center will be in Accra, Ghana.

“In recent years, we’ve … witnessed an
increasing interest in machine learning research across the
continent,” senior Google AI fellow Jeff Dean and staff research
scientist Moustapha Cisse wrote in a blog
post. “Events like Data Science Africa 2017 in Tanzania, the
2017 Deep Learning
Indaba event in South Africa, and follow-on IndabaX events in
2018 in multiple countries have shown an exciting and continuing
growth of the computer science research community in Africa.”

Google said that employees in the new AI center,
which will open later this year, will work closely with local
universities, other research centers, and policymakers on the
potential uses of AI in Africa. This is Google’s first center
devoted solely to AI research in Africa and, as far as we can tell,
the first from any tech giant (beating Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft
to the punch).

In his blistering, 172-page decision, Judge Leon
did much more than simply reject the government’s claim that
combining
two companies that do not compete with each other would harm
consumers. He also made clear, as a matter of federal law, that the
U.S. Justice Department’s view of a static media landscape is dead
and buried.

“If there ever were an antitrust case where the
parties had a dramatically different assessment of the current state
of the relevant market and a fundamentally different vision of its
future development,” Judge Leon began his decision, “this is the
one.”

… As more and more lawyers specialize in
cannabis law, that means increasing competition among them. As
competition increases, firms ramp up their cannabis-related
marketing. For many, a key piece of that marketing is a cannabis law
blog.

In much of the country, the stereotype that boys
do better than girls at math isn’t true – on average, they
perform about the same, at least through eighth grade. But there’s
a notable exception.

In school districts that are mostly rich, white
and suburban, boys are much more likely to outperform girls in math,
according to a
new study from Stanford researchers, one of the most
comprehensive looks at the gender gap in test scores at the school
district level.

… On English tests, girls test better than
boys regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic status.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Microsoft has issued
a Windows 10 security update to prevent hackers from breaking into
PCs using Cortana. Microsoft’s digital assistant is built into
every version of Windows 10, McAfee
security researchers discovered it could be summoned from a lock
screen to execute malicious software. Any potential hacker
would need physical access to a PC, and McAfee details
methods to get the digital assistant to index files from a USB drive
and execute them.

These files could be
executable ones, or Powershell scripts that can even go as far as
resetting a Windows 10 account password.

… A lawsuit filed by former employee Amy Liu
this month alleges that Clarifai’s computer systems were
compromised by one or more people in Russia, potentially exposing
technology used by the US military to an adversary. The lawsuit says
Clarifai learned of the breach last November, but that Clarifai’s
CEO and other executives did not promptly report it to the Pentagon.

“Abstract – Journalists now regularly trumpet
fact-checking as an important tool to hold politicians accountable
for their public statements, but fact checking’s effect has only
been assessed anecdotally and in experiments on politicians holding
lower-level offices. Using a rigorous research design to estimate
the effects of fact-checking on presidential candidates, this paper
shows that a fact-checker
deeming a statement false false causes a 9.5 percentage points
reduction in the probability that the candidate repeats the claim.
To eliminate alternative explanations that could confound this
estimate, I use two types of difference-in-differences analyses, each
using true-rated claims and “checkable but unchecked” claims, a
placebo test using hypothetical fact-check dates, and a topic model
to condition on the topic of the candidate’s statement. This paper
contributes to the literature on how news media can hold politicians
accountable, showing that when news organizations label a statement
as inaccurate, they affect candidate behavior.”

… The ATM is one of the most visible and
familiar symbols of automation, its 24-hour service demanding neither
coffee breaks nor health insurance.

… It’s not just banks. Automation has also
changed how people shop, park, fly, and more. In the process, it has
reshaped the architecture that contains those experiences—making
them more efficient, often, but also putting machines above people.

Google
Translate is rolling out offline AI-based translations that you can
download

Google has rolled out offline
downloads for its AI-powered translator. So if you don’t have
unlimited data or you have a plan that doesn’t work
internationally, you can now download neural machine translation from
Google’s Android and iOS apps.

Unemployment is sinking and businesses are
churning out more goods and services. Yet even with the economy
standing on tippy toes, prices and wages are climbing a lot more
slowly than anyone has expected.

Now a growing body of research
is putting the blame more pointedly on e-commerce. The spectacular
growth in online shopping, it turns out, is not only tamping down
inflation more than previously thought, but also distorting the way
it is measured.

Via EveryCRSReport – Resources
for Key Economic Indicators:, May 30, 2018: An understanding of
economic indicators and their significance is seen as essential to
the formulation of economic policies. These indicators, or
statistics, provide snapshots of an economy’s health as well as
starting points for economic analysis. This report contains a list
of selected authoritative U.S. government sources of economic
indicators, such as gross domestic product (GDP), income, inflation,
and labor force (including employment and unemployment) statistics.
Additional content includes related resources, frequently asked
questions (FAQs), and links to external glossaries.”

Google
Wants to Play a Bigger Role in Your College Search. Here’s What You
Need to Know

Google waded into the college-search process on
Tuesday, announcing that it would elevate certain statistics about
four-year colleges when people use the ubiquitous search engine to
seek out information.

Here’s what that will look like in practice,
Google says: Enter “University of Montana” into the search bar,
and a prominent result will be a selection of statistics about the
institution — its graduation rate and average cost after financial
aid, among other things.

… Law enforcement officials arrested 74 people
for allegedly carrying out business email compromise (BEC) schemes,
or “cyber-enabled financial fraud" as part of Operation Wire
Wire, according to a DOJ
press release.

Hackers execute BEC scams by impersonating
employees or business executives after gaining access to their email
accounts. These types of attacks use social engineering tactics to
trick unsuspecting employees and business executives into making wire
transfers to bank accounts that are controlled by the criminals. The
elderly are particularly targeted in BEC schemes.

The Justice Department coordinated with the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Treasury Department and
the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to track the suspected cyber
crooks, which ultimately resulted in the arrest of 42 alleged
fraudsters in the United States and 29 in Nigeria.

Has management lost the ability to learn from the
mistakes of others? Do they even look outside their own narrow
focus? Does the US have anything set up to review software? AI
software might be more of a concern than emission controlling
software.

Germany's
Transport Ministry on Monday said 774,000 Mercedes-Benz vehicles were
found to contain unauthorized software defeat devices in Europe and
ordered Daimler
to recall 238,000 cars in Germany.

… Daimler confirmed the recall to CNBC and
said "open legal questions will be clarified" during
discussions with the German Ministry of Transport.

Daimler is not the first German automaker to be
investigated for the use of devices meant to defeat diesel emissions
tests. Volkswagen
was slapped with roughly $30 billion in fines over an emissions
cheating scandal that began in 2015, after it was revealed the
automaker had outfitted defeat devices on millions of vehicles
worldwide.

Since the best stories are always the horror
stories, I doubt this will change anything.

The Federal
Aviation Administration(FAA)
is taking an "overly conservative" approach to integrating
drones
into the national airspace, according to a report
requested by Congress and released Monday by the National Academy of
Sciences, Engineering, and Math (NASEM).

The agency "tends to overestimate the
severity and likelihood" of potential dangers associated with
drones, NASEM said and maintains a "near-zero tolerance for
risk" despite the life-saving potential of drones.

Legacy companies are falling like dominoes to
disruptors. Together, emerging technology and new business models
have created new ways of serving customers. The same way Airbnb,
Uber, and LinkedIn fundamentally changed the lodging, taxi, and
recruiting industries, titans such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook
are now poised to disrupt every industry as wide-ranging as health
insurers to grocers. It’s safe to say that no industry will be
left untouched — but is yours next?

A number of industries seem to be “safe” from
disruption, but often the markets most at risk do not see it coming.
Who would have predicted, for example, that Amazon would follow its
acquisition of Whole Foods Market with a jump
into health care? We have looked at common patterns among more
recent business model innovations and determined three major signals
that your industry could be on the precipice of major change.

This feels like something from a William Gibson
cyberpunk dystopia novel, where the government has become so weak and
useless, private corporations have been taking over the basic upkeep
of the nation. But it’s not a William Gibson novel, there’s no
plucky protagonist with some sort of cybernetic implant, it’s just
America in 2018, with crumbling roads that Domino’s
has decided to fix. For the sake of the pizzas.

Domino’s is tired of their innocent
pizzas, who only
wish to serve humankind, being beaten all to hell by
poorly-maintained roads. They even have
a website that shows, in graphic, pizza-box-cam detail, what
brutal hell pizzas are put through when their delivery vehicle
impacts a pothole.

… To remedy this, Domino’s has been hiring
work crews to repair potholes in a number of cities, including
Burbank, CA (five holes fixed), Bartonville, TX (eight holes), an
impressive 40 holes fixed in Milford, DE, and an astounding 150
potholes filled in Athens, GA.

It’s not entirely altruistic, of course.
Domino’s tags every filled pothole with their logo and the tagline
“OH YES WE DID.”

PowerPoint has many
features that students and teachers often overlook. That's bound
to happen with any program that has been around as long as PowerPoint
has and includes as many features as PowerPoint does. One of those
overlooked features is found in the Add-ins available for PowerPoint.
Browse through the gallery of Add-ins and you'll find some excellent
tools for math teachers and students.

The GeoGebra
PowerPoint Add-in lets you access GeoGebra materials directly
from your PowerPoint slides. You can also use the Add-in to create
graphs, shapes, and spreadsheets within your slides. The GeoGebra
PowerPoint Add-in works in the desktop and online versions of
PowerPoint.

Khan Academy's math videos and math practice
exercises are available in a PowerPoint Add-in. The Khan
Academy PowerPoint Add-in lets you find videos and exercises to
insert directly into slides. The exercises that you insert into your
slides are fully functional which means that you could use them for
live demonstrations without having to leave your slides.

PhET provides free interactive math and science
simulations covering topics in physics, chemistry, biology, earth
science, and mathematics. In the PhET library you'll find
simulations appropriate for elementary, middle, high school, and
university students. More than 50 of the PhET simulations are
available to insert into PowerPoint presentations through the use of
PhET's
free PowerPoint Add-in. With the Add-in installed you can browse
the available simulations and insert them into your slides. The
simulations work in your slide just as they do on the PhET website.

A month ago I was milling about a hotel room in
New Orleans, procrastinating my prep for on-stage sessions at a tech
conference, when I received a startling iMessage. “It’s Alan
Murray,” the note said, referring to my
boss’ boss’ boss.

Not in the habit of having Mr. Murray text my
phone, I sat up straighter. “Please post your latest story here,”
he wrote, including a link to a site purporting to be related to
Microsoft
365, replete with Microsoft’s official corporate logo and
everything. In the header of the iMessage thread, Apple’s virtual
assistant Siri offered a suggestion: “Maybe: Alan Murray.”

The sight made me stagger, if momentarily. Then I
remembered: A week or so earlier I had granted a cybersecurity
startup, Wandera, permission to demonstrate a phishing attack on me.
They called it, “Call Me Maybe.”

… Wandera reported the problem as a security
issue to Apple on April 25th. Apple sent a preliminary response a
week later, and a few days after that said it did not consider the
issue to be a “security vulnerability,” and that it had
reclassified the bug as a software issue “to help get it resolved.”

What’s alarming about the ploy is how little
effort it takes to pull off. “We didn’t do anything crazy here
like jailbreak a phone or a Hollywood style attack—we’re not
hacking into cell towers,” said Dan Cuddeford, Wandera’s director
of engineering. “But it’s something that your layman hacker or
social engineer might be able to do.

Many
enterprises have been taking stock of their security architecture as
well as assessing gaps and redundancies (see last month’s article
Wading
Through Tool Overload and Redundancy?). Sometimes it is the
result of a post breach investigation, and the post investigation
finger pointing. Sometimes it is due to new management taking stock
of the company’s risk exposure. Sometimes it is a financially
driven exercise to better understand budgets and bang for the buck.
Regardless of the motivation, what many
are finding is that they don’t really have an architecture so much
as a bunch of disparate parts sitting in silos across the
environment.
Looking back at it all, CISOs may wonder how they got there, but
hindsight is always 20/20.

Another
Architecture article. I assigned a project (due this week) to
develop the architecture for a banking (ATM) App. I wonder if any of
my students even considered some of these features?

Want your Amazon Echo to play Money, Money,
Money every time you get paid? Or for your debit card to
automatically record every purchase you make on a budgeting
spreadsheet? Well, challenger bank Monzo is making a move to become
the UK's first smart bank and is using If This Then That (IFTTT) to
connect your account to a host of other services.

Monzo's integration with IFTTT lets people build
mini ‘applets’ by setting a series of personalised rules
automatically triggered by actions in the real world. This is the
first time that a bank has linked-up with IFTTT to connect their bank
account with a range of other apps and devices.

When you calculate what you owe for your portion
of lunch, drinks or cab rides down to the penny and share it with
your friends, does that boost or harm your standing in a group?

It’s a good question, and a familiar one for
anyone who’s made Venmo,
a hugely
popular app owned by PayPal that allows you to quickly transfer
money to other people’s accounts to pay for anything from a cup of
coffee to your share of the dinner bill.

As The New York Timespointed
out recently, while you can keep account information and payments
private, many users do not, essentially broadcasting their financial
activity in the same way they show off their happy vacation photos on
Facebook or Instagram.

Sounds like “Pre-Crime.” Do the police have
the expertise to see (in a brief records review) what teachers don’t
see with daily contact?

In
Bensalem, Bucks County, the school district has spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars on some 500 surveillance cameras in and around
its facilities.

But
the township police director, Fred Harran, doesn’t think they are
enough.

He
is pushing for preventative measures on another front. Harran wants
Pennsylvania lawmakers to give greater access to police for
information about students: grades, medical records, attendance
history.

A federal judge indicated Friday he will
uphold a California law allowing police to collect and store DNA
samples from people arrested but not yet charged with crimes.

The government has a high interest in
accurately identifying arrestees, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer
said, perhaps even greater
than an arrestee’s expectation of privacy under the Fourth
Amendment. Breyer suggested scenarios in which the
arrestee is an ex-con who has a gun on him, but he gives the cops a
phony I.D. during booking, or one in which someone is arrested on a
case of mistaken identity.

The camera perched above the bus stop sends back a
continuous feed from the corner of 16th Avenue and South 18th Street
in Newark’s West Ward. Regular customers come and go from Max’s,
a convenience store, and a man without a shirt paces aimlessly on the
same slice of pavement. Anyone with a fast internet connection and a
desire to watch could also see Fernando Demarzino stepping out of his
cousin’s barbershop.

“My girlfriend called and told me what I had in
my hand,” Mr. Demarzino said on a recent evening as he stood within
the camera’s line of sight. His girlfriend had heard about
official camera feeds that had recently been made available online,
and she was checking out the spot where she knew she was likely to
find Mr. Demarzino. He had change in his hand, and she jokingly told
him the image was sharp enough for her to count out three quarters.
She also spotted his Jeep parked on the street.

… in Newark, the police have taken an
extraordinary step that few, if any, other departments in the country
have pursued: They have opened up feeds from dozens of
closed-circuit cameras to the public, asking viewers to assist the
force by watching over the city and reporting anything suspicious.

The Citizen Virtual Patrol, as the program is
called, has been hailed by officials as a move toward transparency in
a city where a mistrust of the police runs deep, rooted in
long-running claims of aggressive enforcement and racial animosity.
The cameras, officials said, provide a way to recruit residents as
Newark tries to shake a dogged reputation for violence and crime.
“This is part of building a partnership,” said Anthony F.
Ambrose, who, as public safety director, oversees the city’s police
and fire operations. Since the program started about a month ago, he
said, 1,600 users have signed into the website, and residents
have been lobbying the department to add more cameras in their
neighborhoods.

Digital forensics is a
branch of forensic science focused on recovery and investigation of
artifacts found on digital devices. Any devices that store data
(e.g. computers, laptops, smartphones, thumb drives, memory cards or
external hard drives) are within the ambit of digital forensics.
Given the proliferation of digital devices, there has been a ramp-up
in use of digital forensics in legal cases and investigations.

Lawrence
Lessig – Wired [Lawrence Lessig (@lessig)
is the Roy L. Furman professor of law and leadership at Harvard
University and founder of Equal Citizens. He was lead counsel in
Eldred v. Ashcroft (2002)]: “Almost exactly 20 years ago,
Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which
extended the term of existing copyrights by 20 years. The Act was
the 11th extension in the prior 40 years, timed perfectly to assure
that certain famous works, including Mickey Mouse, would not pass
into the public domain. Immediately after the law came into force, a
digital publisher of public domain works, Eric
Eldred, filed a lawsuit challenging the act. The Constitution
gives Congress the power to secure copyrights “for limited times,”
for the express purpose of “promot[ing] Progress.” Extending the
copyright of an existing work, Eldred argued, could not promote
anything — the work already exists. And repeated extensions of
existing terms cannot be what the framers meant by “limited times.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the challenge. I was lead
counsel for the plaintiff. And in addition to our brief, a scad
of creators who build upon the public domain, along with librarians,
archivists, and economists, filed briefs in support of Eldred; Nobel
Prize winner Milton Friedman agreed to sign the economists’ brief
only if the words “no brainer” were included. Yet the court
rejected our challenge to the law… Twenty years later, the fight
for term extension has begun anew. Buried in an otherwise harmless
act, passed by the House and now being considered in the Senate, this
new
bill purports to create a new digital performance right—basically
the right to control copies of recordings on any digital platform
(ever hear of the internet?)—for musical recordings made before
1972…”

Four years ago, when Rich Fulop founded
Brooklinen, the direct-to-consumer luxury bedding startup, the
customer acquisition strategy was straightforward for DTC brands:
pour money into Facebook ads.

Soon, Brooklinen was spending up to 75 percent of
its overall ad budget on Facebook. But Brooklinen and other DTC
companies, and marketers of all stripes, were pouring money into
Facebook’s giant ad machine, lured
by micro-targeting segments. Simple economics took over:
Facebook ads became very expensive for DTC brands like Brooklinen,
Thinx, Roman and Quip — all of which are now diversifying their
spending to new channels, including fuddy-duddy outlets like
out-of-home, terrestrial radio and even — heavens — print.

“We’re
trying to move away from Facebook as fast as we can,”
said Fulop, who said CPMs on the platform are double what they were a
year ago. “We’re fighting in this little slip of real estate
with everyone else out there and it’s hard to cut through. You’re
paying an impression-based auction so you are essentially bidding
against anybody and everybody that wants to compete for that space,
so it’s become a hyper-competitive environment.”

EdSurge:
“The printed book just won’t die. But another print-based
technology—the copy machine—is disappearing from many academic
libraries, as librarians swap the old dime-eating machines for
multi-function devices that
scan texts and send copies to students via email.
“Copiers seem to be going the way of the dodo, slowly,” says
Stephanie Walker, dean of libraries and information resources at the
University of North Dakota. The switch from copiers to scanners
makes sense in the hybrid digital/print environment students and
faculty operate in now. There’s also a financial incentive for
academic libraries looking to economize and streamline operations and
provide patrons with the services they most need. And in at least
one case, the rise of the scanner has created an opportunity for an
academic library to engage in a little community-minded
entrepreneurship, providing fellow libraries with a customized
computer/scanner/software bundle that won’t break the bank…
Budget pressures have hastened the switch from copiers to scanners…”

Just because it seems illustrative. (Also
interesting: The picture accompanying the article shows the President
signing a bill with a Sharpie. And where does he buy his 4$ shirts?)

Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the
Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building,
standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as
a records management analyst, was a career government official with
close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything
like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had
never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and
his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and
put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other
times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like
confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result
of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records
and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up
papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as
his unofficial “filing system.”

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White
House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the
president touches, sending them to the National Archives for
safekeeping as historical records.

Skip hasn't yet dumped its e-scooters
onto the streets of hometown San Francisco, instead quietly testing
its service in Washington, D.C. while waiting for San Francisco to
put a regulatory regime in place.

Bottom
line: Skip is betting that its friendlier,
play-by-the-rules approach will help put it ahead of competitors like
Bird, Lime and Spin.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.